Word: somersets
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Approaching 50, Tim Cranmer tends a fine old house and vineyard in Somerset bequeathed to him by a wealthy uncle. His retirement is not of his own choosing. After a long stint in British intelligence, coinciding with some of the iciest years of the cold war, he has been bounced by his new boss as unsuited for the new world order: "I mean twenty-five years do rather shape the mind, don't they? I'd have thought you'd be far better off agreeing you'd served your stint, and time to find pastures new." Whatever disappointment Tim feels...
...feeling: "I understand that the Pforzheimers have done a lot for the University, but isn't it a little long?" she asked. "Pforzheimer, the Pfabulous house with the Pfunny name." One wonders whether students would have had such clever things to say if North had become 'Winchester' or 'Somerset...
Even if the spectacle of politics coming to grips with pathology is not pretty, who can deny that when 11-year-olds like Robert ("Yummy") Sandifer kill or when a 14-year-old drives nails into the heels of a younger boy -- a recent episode from Somerset, Pennsylvania -- there is good reason to be unnerved? A breeding ground of poverty and broken families and drugs and guns and violence, real or just pictured, has brought forth a violent generation. "We need to throw out our entire juvenile-justice system," says Gil Garcetti, the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, whose...
...enemies were ignorance and prejudice, his own and other people's: he met transcriptionists who would run away so as not to have to type up his examinations of gay patients, and dentists who would refuse to see unmarried men. In the tradition of the best doctor-writers, from Somerset Maugham to Ethan Canin, Verghese took it all down with a fine mix of compassion and precision, understanding not only why men suffer but how they feel...
...ILLUSION THAT YOUTH IS happy," said W. Somerset Maugham. "An illusion of those who have lost it." That illusion has been fading especially fast in one of the most prosperous and conservative corners of the country, home to the fantasy capital of America, Disneyland, and to a host of quieter fantasies as well. For residents of Orange County, California, the most perishable myth would seem to be that honor students, computer geniuses and star athletes would make headlines only for their remarkable achievements, never for their ruthless crimes...